Family

We took our popup camper for it's shake down cruise last weekend with a camping trip in Bil and Nanc's side yard. Bil, Nanc and the boys went to Nanc's parent's cabin, so it was just us and the animals for the weekend.

Bill and Nanc live on a hobby farm near Stillwater and have two horses, two lamas, a goat, a pony, chickens and to many cats to count (actually I think it's three house cats and four barn cats, but I'm not sure.) They also have a dog, but they took her with them.

We brought along one of Rosalyn's friends and the girls were in heaven taking care of all the animals.

The camper performed wonderfully and I got some 'mods' done to it.

On Sunday we had a big hail storm with hail larger than golf balls! The camper has some dents in the roof, the truck has some dents in the hood and the roof and the car has a broken windshield.

Here is a tour of the camper.

Here are photos from the camping trip at the farm.

And here is an album of the 'mods' I made to the camper.

Updated: It appears I had the link to the 'mods' wrong. Silly me. It's fixed now.

We took the plunge on Saturday and bought a popup camper. It's a 1992 vintage Jayco that's in pretty good shape. We drove it out to Bil's house to store it and practice setting it up.

It goes up and down pretty easily. It pulls pretty well too.



It will be nice to sleep off the ground for a change.

Wow, it's been a while since I updated this blog. I've been pretty busy. The thing that is taking most of my time is that I a mentor for the the Southwest High School FIRST Robotics Team!

FIRST (Foundation for the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a foundation started in 1989 by Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway among other things) to get kids interested in Science.

They have a Robotics Challenge every year and it's a really cool thing.

Stephanie is a member of the build team and we have been meeting three to four times a week for the past three weeks. The competition build schedule is pretty aggressive - you learn what the contest is and get your box of parts, then you have six (6) weeks to build your robot!

We are in week three and I think we are fully on track to get it done in time.

I have put up a photo gallery of build photos.

You can find out now. GetGrandpasFBIFile.com is a website that will help you fill out the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) forms to send to the FBI to request the files they might have on your (deceased) grandparent. (Or other relative I suppose.)

Kind of interesting. I might just have to do this for my grandparents.

I started reading some Larry Niven short stories to Steph last night. The first story was "Bordered in Black" and we got about a third of the way into it. As I was reading it to her I remembered the ending. It will be fun to watch her reaction.

The story is about the first hyperspace ship and there is a bit in it about what you see out the window of the ship in hyperspace.

The answer is "nothing" and it totally freaks out the astronauts.

She couldn't understand why that would be so weird, so we had a nice discussion about what it would be like to look out her bedroom window and see "nothing". It took a few tries to explain what "nothing" would be like and when she got it, she got a little weirded out.

It was pretty funny, you really have to pay attention when you are reading Niven and she made me backtrack a few times.

Larry Niven is one of my favorite authors and I love hard science fiction. Larry Niven's Known Space universe is one I'd like to live in.

Our spice cupboard is a mess. It's full of all sorts of different types of bottles. Jam jars, baby food jars, jars of all sizes.

Needless to say, it's hard to find the spice you want, and they don't fit into the cupboard very well.

I'm tired of it.

So I'm going to buy a bunch of jars, all alike, and label them and maybe even make some risers so you can see what's in the back of the cupboard.

But where to buy the jars? LeeVally has a couple of options, but they are a little pricey.

So I did a Google search and found Specialty Bottle. As Bill and Ted say: "Excellent!"

I like these hexagonal ones.

Or maybe these plain ones.

And if I needed to send someone a message in a bottle, they would have me covered.

The prices are most excellent too. Now I just have to convince SWMBO.

Snowman
ISO3200, 1/45s, F4.5, Hand Held

The third (and last for now) photo from our trip to the Holidazzle parade.

Bow, Captain Hook's Ship
ISO3200, 1/45s, F5.6, Hand Held

Another photo from our trip to the Holidazzle parade.

Santa's Sleigh
ISO 3200, 1/30S, F4.5, Hand Held

On Wednesday, we went down to watch the Holidazzle parade. We had tried to go on Saturday, but realized when we got down there that we had made a fatal mistake:

We went on a Saturday. And the weather was nice.

Bad idea.

But Wednesday? That's the day to go.

I brought my camera down and fooled around taking some low light photos. This is the first of three that I liked a lot.

I happened to see a copy of Robert A. Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars at the library the other day, so I picked it up for Stephanie to read.

Podkayne of Mars is the last book that Heinlein wrote in his collection of books for juvenile readers, so I figured that Stephanie would like it.

She wanted me to read it to her, so we've both been enjoying it quite a bit. It's fun to read it to her and then have her ask questions about it. There are lots of science concepts introduced in his books that she is unfamiliar with and so far I have been able to explain all of them.

We are getting near the end, so I just requested Rocket Ship Galileo from the library.

I'm going to see if we can make it though all 13 of the books and then we will start on his more adult harder stuff (which I own a lot of.) Maybe we will mix in some Larry Niven and some Jerry Pournelle (man, what an ugly web site - and I can't seem to find a bibliography on it) and maybe some Stephen Brust and Fritz Lieber (I know, that's not Science Fiction, but I like Fantasy too). Actually, what would be really fun would be to read Terry Pratchett's Discworld books to her.

It's fun to see Stephanie getting into Science Fiction.